“You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

God, I want to see You. God, I want to hear You. God, I want to know You. God, I want to follow hard after You. And even before I know what I will face today, I say yes to You.

After every storm, if you look hard enough, a rainbow appears.

General rules will bear hard on particular cases.

It seems to me, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

It’s hard – some people get inspired by a feeling, but I’m mostly inspired by melodies.

Break-ups are hard for anybody, but it’s particularly tough when it’s being documented and you see the person’s picture everywhere. Most people don’t have that added problem when they break up with someone.

If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.

It’s a very hard goal. But, what I want is to tell people who are getting bullied to stand up to the bully and not let it be OK – tell a teacher, the principal, or your parents. I want people to stand up and to be confident.